Released 1996
This was the first ever official Walt Meadornack album, though it was named so about two years after its recording. Personnel was Walt, Slippy Breadstick and Donnie Maleriamax and it was recorded in the Hanger. This is sort of the awakening of a new kind of recording, unrehearsed, unprompted, vaguely cinematic. You’ll read about recordings in the old days when there would be one mic in the room and an engineer had to slowly and methodically place the musicians according to volume and timbre throughout the room to get a balanced sound. Here, you have the opposite. There was one mic in the room and the instruments – a guitar plugged into an amp tipped over face-down on the grown, a flanged strobe light, balloons, oboes and train whistles – all had their stations throughout the room and the mic was whisked about like a hand-held camera to capture everything. This is the Cassavettes of the music world, raw and untouched and real and handicapped out the door, a pair of Bengals sweatpants on sale with imperfections at Valu City.
Here’s the original description of the piece, from the home site, it says a lot about the group’s initial dynamic and attitude toward the whole enterprise: “Everything Walt Meadornack stands for. This is what it’s all about folks. The tape that started it all. The All-Stars have yet to top this dandy of annoyance and irritation. No words are spoken, no melodies are played. Almost all the sounds are unaided by amplification, making this the most natural phonic orchestra ever created by the Walt and His All-Stars. It’s an epic. It was recorded in a pitch black room, with the exception of sporadic flashing of a strobe light. This tape is pure ambition. A oneness with sound perhaps never before achieved on this plane. And it’s not too pretty from the outside.”
Fairly snotty and uninformed, but there was already an element of purity there. A sense that, yes, they had no idea what they were talking about.
“Alternate Ending:”
Track listing:
1. Noise
2. Alternate Ending
3. A Special Message from Walt Meadornack
